Author: Andrew Hamm

This week we highlight three cert petitions pending before the Supreme Court that address offender-registration laws and the ex post facto clause; state sovereign immunity in the context of Rule 23 class settlements; and what the Constitution requires of a court on habeas review in capital cases.

Boyd v. Washington18-39Issue: Whether the requirement of frequent, in-person reporting renders an offender-registration law punitive, such that applying the law retroactively violates the ex post facto clause.

GlaxoSmithKline LLC v. Louisiana18-42Issue: Whether state sovereign immunity bars a federal court from binding a state to a Rule 23 class settlement as an absent class member plaintiff based on the state’s failure to opt out of the class.

Carty v. Texas18-50Issues: (1) Whether the Constitution requires a court on habeas review in a capital case to assess cumulatively the prejudice caused by multiple constitutional errors at a criminal trial; and (2) whether the state’s intentional suppression of evidence in violation of Brady v. Maryland prejudiced the petitioner by itself or in combination with the objectively unreasonable performance of her trial counsel.

[Editor’s Note: The afternoon after this post was published, Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican of Kansas, met Judge Brett Kavanaugh and tweeted that he “will support his nomination.”]

After Justice Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court in January 2017, attention turned to whether Senate Democrats would use the filibuster, a maneuver to block final action on an issue until a 60-vote majority can force a vote. If they did, would Republicans enact the “nuclear option,” a rule change to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations?

“Please, don’t do it this time,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, speaking last year about the filibuster, beseeched Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, as Carl Hulse reported in the New York Times.

Last year Collins and Bennet, among other senators from each party, hoped to reach a deal to prevent a filibuster and avoid the nuclear option. They were unsuccessful – Democrats filibustered, Republicans changed existing Senate rules, and Gorsuch was confirmed on April 7, 2017.

Consistent with last year’s rule change, Republicans need 50 votes to confirm current nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Democratic Sen. Doug Jones’ victory over Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last fall brought the Republican majority from 52 to 51. In addition, Republican Sen. John McCain remains home in Arizona while undergoing treatment for brain cancer, with former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer dismissing the notion that McCain might resign so current Gov. Doug Ducey can appoint a replacement. With only 50 voting senators, Republicans may not be able to afford a single “no” vote, and the recent failed nomination of Ryan Bounds to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit gives some on the left hope that confirmation is not inevitable. (In this post, Jon Levitan addresses the possibility that one or more Democrats may choose to vote “yes” on Kavanaugh’s confirmation, which would give Republicans some leeway.)

According to SCOTUS Watch, which “tracks the public statements made by United States senators about how they plan to vote,” 31 Republicans are “likely yes” and 16 (including McCain) are “definitely yes” on the confirmation. This leaves four “unknown” – Collins, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas. All four of these senators voted to confirm Gorsuch. Collins, Murkowski and Roberts also voted in 2006 to confirm Kavanaugh to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Paul was not in the Senate at that time.

As Li Zhou wrote for Vox the night of Kavanaugh’s nomination, “all eyes are on” Collins and Murkowski. This week Zhou reported that the two women are “taking their time evaluating the nominee,” with whom neither has yet scheduled an appointment.

On Tuesday, Collins told reporters that she would schedule a meeting with Kavanaugh after further reviewing his record, saying that “it’s not going to be any time immediately because I still have a ton of work to do on his decisions, his law review articles, a lot of others.”

As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin reported in the New York Times before Kavanaugh’s nomination, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was “concerned about the volume of documents that Judge Kavanaugh has created” in his career, which, Haberman and Martin wrote, “McConnell fears could hand Senate Democrats an opportunity to delay the confirmation vote.” And although at least two Democratic senators – Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana – have scheduled meetings with Kavanaugh, other Democrats have refused to provide him customary “courtesy visits” in a dispute over the release of documents. Some Democrats are pushing for access to all communications from Kavanaugh’s time in the White House, but Collins on Tuesday said only, “I want to see documents that he himself wrote. … It does not make sense to ask for those documents just because he touched them, initialed them,” as Jordain Carney reported for The Hill.

In a CNN interview after Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, Collins told Jake Tapper that she “would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade.”

Asked by Tapper about President Donald Trump’s campaign promise that opposition to abortion would be a “litmus test” for his selection of Supreme Court justices, Collins said that “the president told me in our meeting that he would not ask that question, and that’s what he has most recently said on the advice of his attorney. So, I think what he said as a candidate may not have been informed by the legal advice that he now has that it would be inappropriate for him to ask a nominee how he or she would rule on a specific issue.”

Collins emphasized for Tapper the importance she places on a nominee’s respect for precedent, which she called a “fundamental tenet of our judicial system.” She said she did not think that Gorsuch would overturn Roe, saying “someone who devotes that much time to writing a book on precedent [“The Law of Judicial Precedent”], I think, understands how important a principle that is in our judicial system.”

A co-author of the same book on precedent: Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Collins has said that she would not ask Kavanaugh about his “personal views” on Roe, but called “very interesting” a speech he gave last year about the work of former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who dissented in Roe. In her analysis for this blog of this speech and a past opinion in an abortion case for the D.C. Circuit, Amy Howe suggested that even if Kavanaugh is not a fifth vote to overturn Roe, he could become the fifth sitting justice “to believe that various restrictions on abortion do not rise to the level of an ‘undue burden’ on a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy.”

“You’re going to get a lot of pressure from groups and individuals who support abortion rights,” Tapper predicted in his interview with Collins. Indeed, commentary to this effect has come from Richard Chen in the Portland Press Herald and Brianne Gorod in the Bangor Daily News, among others.

According to Zhou, Murkowski “has held her cards a bit closer to the chest,” although her initial press release, like Collins’, “didn’t seem to suggest an inclination toward blocking him,” Zhou concludes. In an interview with C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this week, Murkowski said that “trying to identify or distill out that there is one issue that for me will guide my determination on this nomination … that’s not how I operate. I have been looking at Judge Kavanaugh and his record holistically.”

Laura Bassett for the Huffington Post reports that a survey by a Democratic polling firm indicates that 68 percent of Maine voters and 63 percent of Alaska voters do not want Roe overturned.

However, Collins, who is up for re-election in 2020, faces a closed primary, which means that only registered Republicans are able to vote. The reported polling indicates that just 46 percent of Maine Republicans want Roe upheld. What this indicates for how Collins may assess the political implications of her vote on Kavanaugh is unclear. But one factor for her may be the need to survive the primary.

Murkowski, who is not up for re-election until 2022, faces a different situation. The Alaska Division of Elections website states that “voters registered with the party affiliation of Republican, Nonpartisan or Undeclared may vote” in the Republican primary. According to Alaska statistics from early July, about 55 percent of Alaskan votes are nonpartisan or undeclared, and about a quarter are Republican. The reported polling indicates that although only 32 percent of Alaska Republicans want Roe upheld, 72 percent of “Independents” do. But again, what this means for Murkowski, who lost the Republican primary in 2010 but won re-election as a write-in candidate, remains unclear.

In more recent days, Paul, the third “unknown” Republican vote according to SCOTUS Watch, has attracted attention. As Burgess Everett reported for Politico, Paul in an interview called himself “honestly undecided” on Kavanaugh’s nomination because Kavanaugh has “very strongly and explicitly” expressed the position that “national security trumps privacy.”

Yet in this same piece, Everett quoted Paul as asking, rhetorically, “Wouldn’t you rather have Kavanaugh than Ruth Bader Ginsburg?” Everett writes that “Republican leaders are laying off Paul for the most part, figuring a heavy hand won’t work,” with some confident that Paul “ultimately will fall in line, since opposing Kavanaugh could wreck the senator’s relationship with the president.” Kavanaugh and Paul met on Tuesday, but what they discussed and whether it moved Paul remain unclear.

It does not appear that Roberts, SCOTUS Watch’s fourth “unknown” Republican, has commented on the pending nomination except for a press release congratulating Kavanaugh and saying that he looks forward to meeting him.

Two corrections have been made to the original version of this post, which had identified Brewer as the current governor of Arizona and Alaska’s Republican primary as open only to registered Republicans. The information about Alaska voters’ party affiliations and Murkowski’s 2010 primary defeat has been added to provide additional context given that the primary is in fact open to some non-Republicans.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh remains atop the slow-moving Supreme Court news cycle. Adam Liptak of The New York Times surveys 12 sets of evaluations spanning 700 pages from about 350 law students at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown and finds “almost only glowing praise for Judge Kavanaugh’s teaching.” Former Harvard students praise Kavanaugh in a letter at Boston Globe.

Lorraine Woellert of Politico covers the refusal of New York Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democratic leaders to meet with Kavanaugh, “another salvo in the deepening cold war” between Trump and Schumer. Elise Viebeck of The Washington Post reports that Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said Wednesday that senators expect to receive “at least 1 million pages of documents” related to Kavanaugh’s time in President George W. Bush’s administration and as a Republican “political operative,” which Viebeck calls “a sign of a mammoth task that could slow the timeline for confirmation hearings.” Coverage on polling about Kavanaugh’s possible confirmation – from Gallup, the Pew Research Center and Fox News – comes from Alex Lubben for Vice News and Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight.

Commentary on the confirmation process comes from Kent Greenfield on WBUR’s Cognoscenti blog, who contends that the “Senate should wait to vote on Kavanaugh until we can be sure Trump’s entire presidency is not illegitimate because of espionage, conspiracy, collusion and — yes — treason.” Dahlia Lithwick and Jed Shugerman of Slate credit Kavanaugh for “his candor in taking his stands against Roe last year,” but argue that this topic “must also be addressed directly during his confirmation.”

David Savage of Los Angeles Times reports that the “Supreme Court could have a conservative majority to strike down bans on semi-automatic weapons in California and other liberal states and to decree that law-abiding Americans have a right to carry a gun in public.” Mark Sherman and Jennifer Peltz of Associated Press report that although Kavanaugh’s record on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit does not “directly deal with LGBT issues,” “his approach to judging leads some scholars and activists to believe he is unlikely to echo Kennedy’s votes.” For this blog, Tejinder Singh reviews Kavanaugh’s dissent in a challenge to the Affordable Care Act, Seven-Sky v. Holder. Richard Wolf of USA Today reports that even as Kavanaugh has been a “reliable conservative vote” on the D.C. Circuit, he “has displayed a degree of understanding that often borders on empathy for the policy goals of those he rules against.” Eric Posner on his eponymous blog assesses Kavanaugh and claims that “[w]hatever he is, he’s not an originalist, at least not by self-identification. Not yet, anyway.”

Traci Yoder at the National Lawyers Guild blog expresses concern about Kavanaugh’s confirmation and encourages better organizing on the left, while Anthony Marcum in an op-ed for The Hill suggests that even “if Kavanaugh is confirmed to serve on the Supreme Court, there will inevitably be some surprises.” Oliver Roeder of FiveThirtyEight conducts the “morbid exercise” of assessing how long the current justices are likely to stay on the bench.

One of the term’s major cases was Janus v. AFSCME, in which the Supreme Court overruled Abood v. Detroit Board of Education and held that the state of Illinois’ extraction of agency fees from nonconsenting public-sector employees violates the First Amendment. Aaron Tang at Take Care looks at lawsuits about refunds for fair-share fees collected before the decision, which he sees as unlikely to succeed. Jennifer Mueller of Slate assesses the logic underpinning the decision and suggests it may be “bad news for public pensions” as well.

Briefly:

Sheldon Nahmod on his eponymous blog analyzes the Supreme Court’s decision this term in Lozman v. Riviera Beach, in which the court held that existence of probable cause for Fane Lozman’s arrest for disrupting a city council meeting does not bar his First Amendment retaliatory arrest claim under the circumstances of this case.

Tony Mauro of The National Law Journal (registration required) reports that two petitions involving Bill Cosby “are drawing interest, in part because the justices have not recently taken up disputes over libel and defamation, a part of First Amendment doctrine that is well-settled.”

As Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination reaches its 10th day, it continues to generate interest. Jeffrey Jones presents the results of a Gallup poll: A “four-percentage point margin [in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation] is slimmer than any Gallup has measured in its initial read on 10 prior nominees since 1987,” with the average margin being 23 points. At the same time, Scott Bixby of the Daily Beast reports that “[p]rogressive groups are falling behind in the war over President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee—and they’re barely trying to catch up.” Additional coverage comes from Matt Vespa for Townhall. Kevin Daley of The Daily Caller reports that a “left-leaning advocacy group, which plans to spend millions opposing Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, has obscured its funding sources through an opaque organizational structure.”

Manu Raju of CNN reports on remarks by Kavanaugh about “his desire to overturn a three-decade-old Supreme Court ruling upholding the constitutionality of an independent counsel,” a comment Raju predicts will “get renewed scrutiny,” although Raju adds that whether “Kavanaugh views Mueller’s appointment and investigation itself as unconstitutional is unclear, given the special counsel works directly for the Justice Department under a different set of rules that governed the independent counsel.” At Daily Kos, Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter-Poza suggests that the “more telling part of the video clip is Kavanaugh’s slippery discussion of stare decisis, the principle that a court should almost always adhere to precedent.”

Kavanaugh’s experience in the White House under President George W. Bush’s administration also attracts attention. Michael Kranish of The Washington Post reports that “Senate Democrats have never fully accepted Kavanaugh’s answers to questions about one of the Bush administration’s most controversial policies, [its torture policy and treatment of detainees,] and now they are prepared to resurrect the issue as Kavanaugh faces a hearing as President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.” Steven Mazie, at The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, notes a watchdog organization’s pending request under the Freedom of Information Act for Kavanaugh documents and comments that “[i]t would be better if the records came to light before senators vote to confirm him to a lifetime appointment shaping American law.”

Additional commentary on Kavanaugh’s views and what those imply for the future of the court and the nation comes from Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times on reproductive rights and Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress on voting rights. Alia Wong of The Atlantic covers Kavanaugh’s private-school upbringing—if Kavanaugh is confirmed, a majority of the court “will share an experience that is foreign to most Americans: that of attending one of the nation’s private high schools.” Two posts for this blog examine Kavanaugh’s views: Amy Howe looks at abortion and Michael Livermore reviews environmental cases.

Briefly:

In an op-ed for Los Angeles Times, James Lindgren and Ross Stolzenberg make a case for term limits for Supreme Court justices.

Michael S. Rosenwald of The Washington Post reports on Chief Justice Warren Burger’s “Extreme Court Makeover,” beginning in 1969, and how “rearranging furniture can make the world a more cordial, neighborly place.”

At Justia’s Verdict, Sherry Colb “focus[es] on the strange status of curtilage in Fourth Amendment law,” following this term’s decision in Collins v. Virginia, in which the justices held that the automobile exception to the warrant requirement does not permit a warrantless search of a motorcycle parked in the driveway of a home.

We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast, or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!

President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court continues to garner coverage. Ashley Parker and Robert Costa of The Washington Post report on moments leading up the decision, while Niall Stanage of The Hill lists “five big takeaways from the announcement.” Commentary comes from Carolyn Shapiro at Fortune, who criticizes Trump’s remarks about judges setting aside personal opinions “to do what the law and the Constitution require,” as well as similar comments by Kavanaugh, for being “misleading because they suggest that there are always neutral and objectively correct answers to the hardest legal questions.” Additional commentary comes from David A. Graham at The Atlantic.

At Slate, Lili Loofbourow examines the process leading up to the president’s announcement, concluding that the president’s “point of stoking Nielsen ratings and delivering Kavanaugh was to get as many people to witness what he badly wanted them to: a normal conservative with respectable credentials and a pleasant family presented without vitriol or demagoguery.” In The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports on Kavanaugh’s positions on criminal investigations of sitting presidents and the status of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Additional coverage comes from Salvador Rizzo of The Washington Post. At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick looks into the political consequences of Kavanaugh’s nomination for the midterm elections, suggesting that the “midterms, effective this week, will instead be about whether Trump’s proposed new justice thinks the president can pardon himself. As Republican get-out-the-vote messages go, it’s not a strong one.” Additional commentary comes from Michael A. Cohen at Boston Globe.

“Democrats went on the attack Tuesday against President Trump’s new pick for the Supreme Court,” reports Alexander Bolton of The Hill, “but acknowledged they are unlikely to win the war.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has declared that the nominee “has an obligation—a serious and solemn obligation—to share their personal views” on a range of contentious legal issues,” Russell Berman reports in The Atlantic. In an op-ed for Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby also argues that Kavanaugh should be forthcoming with senators – as, he says, Justice Anthony Kennedy was. David Von Drehle, in an op-ed for The Washington Post, assesses the political situation facing Schumer and suggests that his “tide may be going out.” Political Charge compiles five reasons to oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination and urges its readers to tell senators not to confirm him. Microsoft News provides polling data concerning political interests surrounding this vacancy and the last one.

As for Republicans, Liz Goodwin of The Boston Globe reports that a “detailed review of [Maine Senator Susan] Collins’s voting record reveals that she is anything but a maverick when it comes to the courts, consistently supporting nominees put forth by Republican presidents.” Scott Lemieux of NBC News reports that the nomination “demonstrates the binding power of the conservative legal movement that has pushed the federal courts to the right for decades, while also drawing Trump ever closer to the Republican Party.” Commentary comes from Elaina Plott for The Atlantic, suggesting that many find Trump’s nominations “worth any deeper, institutional threats that this administration may pose.”

Ian MacDougall of ProPublica compiles what he describes as “some of the best reporting on Kavanaugh.” Ellen M. Gilmer of E&E News reports that Kavanaugh “has handled more energy and environmental cases than any other short-listers for Kennedy’s seat,” involving everything from federal climate regulations to gas exports and the Dakota Access pipeline. Other investigations into Kavanaugh’s past record and views comes from David Markus of SDFLA Blog on criminal justice, Elaine S. Povich and Alayna Alvarez of Stateline on states’ rights, and Amy Lee Rosen of Law 360 on tax law. Noting an amicus brief filed yesterday by the Pacific Legal Foundation relying on a Kavanaugh dissent, Oliver Dunford in a blog post writes that “the high Court has more than a few times adopted the reasoning from Judge Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinions—particularly in the area of Administrative Law.” With two posts at Reason, Jonathan Adler and Ilya Somin take more comprehensive looks. Boston Globe covers his background as a professor at Harvard Law School.

Commentary on the change Kavanaugh’s presence will bring to the court comes from Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo on the Boom! Lawyered (podcast) and Andrew Cohen for Rolling Stone. Michael Bobelian of Forbes looks at consequences for the business community, with a review of the history of business interests at the court. At the same time, Richard Wolf of USA Today reports that “a comparison of Kavanaugh’s record on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s record on the Supreme Court leaves the degree of change in doubt.”

Either way, Kavanaugh “may not have to wait too long for controversial cases if he is confirmed to the job, with disputes involving abortion, immigration, gay rights, voting rights and transgender troops possibly heading toward the justices soon,” report Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung for Reuters. Mark Joseph Stern of Slate contends that “there is little doubt that Kavanaugh will gut Roe at the first opportunity. Indeed, he has already provided a road map that shows precisely how he’ll do it.” Julie Rovner of Governing reports that many states are poised to ban abortion, if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

At Slate, Jordan Weissmann disputes Akhil Reed Amar’s op-ed in The New York Times, “A Liberal’s Case for Brett Kavanaugh,” in which Amar calls Kavanaugh’s nomination “Trump’s finest hour, his classiest move”; Weissmann contends that “in the post Merrick Garland era, in which nominations are clearly about pure power politics and little else, a piece like Amar’s at worst reeks of the amoral Ivy League clubbiness that still defines the upper reaches of the legal world and at best is simply naive.”

Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz of Governing reports that the court’s ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, in which the court held that an Illinois law allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for collective-bargaining activities violates the First Amendment, “could squeeze overall union revenue, limiting organized labor’s ability to champion a variety of progressive causes that affect private sector workplaces as well.” In an op-ed at Daily Journal, Deborah la Fetra contends that the “high court’s Janus decision is about state power, not unions.”

Briefly:

Following Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission, in which the court held that SEC administrative law judges are “officers of the United States” within the meaning of the appointments clause, who have to be appointed by the president, a court or a department head, Trump has issued an executive order under which “[f]ederal administrative law judges will be hired directly by individual agencies, rather than from a central pool of candidates,” reports Eric Yoder of The Washington Post.

Yesterday President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to the Supreme Court. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage; Mark Walsh provides a “view” from the East Room. Additional coverage comes from Nina Totenberg on NPR’s Morning Edition (podcast), Tony Mauro of The National Law Journal and David Jackson and Richard Wolf of USA Today. Commentary comes from Jessica Mason Pieklo of Rewire.News, who writes that “as in all reality TV, there was a clear winner in Trump’s selection process. But unlike on The Bachelorette, the rest of us are the ones who were always going to lose.”

Reporting on Kavanaugh as Washington insider comes from Richard Wolf of USA Today and Joan Biskupic of CNN. Writing for The Economist, Steven Mazie calls Kavanaugh “an unremarkable choice for a Republican president,” notwithstanding that for Trump, “who has departed from so many presidential norms, to have picked someone with close ties to the Washington, DC establishment, may seem surprising for its utter conventionality.”

At The National Law Journal, Tony Mauro lists seven of Kavanaugh’s “more notable rulings that will come into sharp focus now” as his nomination moves forward in the Senate; in a second story at The National Law Journal, Mauro, with Mike Scarcella, compiles “snippets from some of Kavanaugh’s remarks over the years” that could also attract attention. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, it “will not take long before the President’s ambition – to choose a Justice who would vote to roll back constitutional protection for women’s abortion rights – could be fulfilled or frustrated,” reports Lyle Denniston for Constitution Daily. Commentary comes from Bill Blum of Truthdig, who writes that except for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, “Trump could not have chosen a candidate who poses a greater threat to progressive values and causes.”

Briefly:

At The Atlantic, Garrett Epps marks the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment by reviewing the history around its ratification. He concludes that “Americans don’t agree on when the amendment was approved, and, I am sure, some in their hearts believe it should not bind the United States today. The battle of 1868 must be fought again, and so far it is not going well.”

Writing for The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, Bernard Grofman parses last term’s partisan-gerrymandering decisions in Gill v. Whitford and Benisek v. Lamone. He describes “tools from the cases” that could make a district-specific standard for challenging partisan gerrymanders “completely manageable.”

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In reaction to President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, politicians and interest groups are releasing statements. SCOTUS Watch is tracking “the public statements made by United States senators about how they plan to vote.” This post tracks the statements by interest groups that we have received. We invite you to alert us (nominationstatements [at] gmail [dot] com) to any statements we have missed.

At 9 p.m., President Donald Trump is expected to announce his nominee for the Supreme Court. Kimberly Atkins of Boston Herald reports on the “last-minute jockeying by lawmakers and other political stakeholders [that] played right into the reality show-like gamesmanship surrounding President Trump’s choice for Supreme Court nominee”; around 4 p.m. this afternoon, Catherine Lucey of Associated Press reported that Trump had “decided on his Supreme Court nominee.”

Whomever Trump selects could set the court “on a new trajectory and deliver decisions to which conservatives have been looking forward for generations,” Bradford Richardson reports for The Washington Times. “The White House expects to immediately hit the ground running once Trump makes his 9 p.m. announcement on Monday, a time he selected for maximum TV exposure as anticipation grows around the pick,” Christopher Cadelago reports for Politico.

Yvonne Abraham addresses Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, in an op-ed for Boston Globe, calling this “only the moment that might define your entire career” and urging her “to protect us from whoever does get the nod” from overturning Roe v. Wade, if confirmed. At The National Law Journal, Leon Friedman contends that even if the nominee is confirmed, “that doesn’t mean progressives are powerless against such rollbacks” to abortion rights, LGBT rights and affirmative action.

J.J. McCullough of National Review argues that a “more rightward Supreme Court will yield many good things, yet political enthusiasm for outcomes should not supersede all other concerns. Supreme Court reform remains a worthy cause because it will help rein in an institution prone by design to imperial overreach.” Ezra Klein of Vox also writes about the need for reform, reasoning that the “Supreme Court has always been undemocratic. What it’s becoming is something more dangerous: anti-democratic.”

Constitution Daily marks the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment’s ratification by looking “at 10 historic Supreme Court cases about due process and equal protection under the law.” At Take Care, David Gans writes that the “legacy of this Amendment, its purpose, and its continuing, urgent relevance show exactly how high the stakes for this nominee and the future of the Supreme Court.” At Politico, Sherrilyn Ifill contends that in this anniversary year, “anyone whose record does not show a demonstrated commitment to the Constitution’s core guarantees of equality and liberty for all shouldbe soundly defeated.”

At Appellate Advocacy Blog, Kent Streseman starts a series of posts on “judicial undoing: the circumstances, process, and advocacy of overruling” precedent. For Reason, Jonathan H. Adler presents data suggesting that the “stark departure from stare decisis seen this past June was something of a departure for the Roberts Court — at least as we have come to know it thus far. Under Chief Justice Roberts, the Court has largely maintained the status quo.”

At ImmigrationProf Blog, Kevin Johnson looks at Justice Anthony Kennedy’s immigration legacy. In an op-ed for The Hill, Bridget C.E. Dooling looks more closely at Kennedy’s concurrence in Pereira v. Sessions, a recent case involving procedures for removal proceedings for nonpermanent residents, in which, she argues, Kennedy “took a broad and aggressive swipe at a doctrine at the core of how our government works.”

Briefly:

At Verdict, Celestine McConville analyses the court’s decision this June in Trump v. Hawaii, which rejected a challenge to the Trump administration’s September 2017 proclamation restricting entry into the United States by nationals of eight countries; she writes that “[t]o support its Establishment Clause analysis, the Court relied on core equal protection precedent and, in the process, seems to have announced a new equal protection rule regarding when the presence of government animus will invalidate government action.”

We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast, or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!

We live-blogged with First Mondays as President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. The transcript is available below and at this link.

MoloLamken has compiled its annual “Supreme Court Business Briefing,” writing that “[a]fter two years of largely modest decisions, the Supreme Court was back in full force, delivering major rulings in the business arena and elsewhere.”

We invite you to alert us (feedback [at] scotusblog [dot] com) to any other reviews of the Supreme Court term.